New data reveals 98 Palestinian deaths in Israeli custody since October 7

Post-mortems of the deceased and testimonies from former detainees suggest many died from torture, medical neglect, and food deprivation. According to a leaked Israeli intelligence database, dozens were civilians.

At least 98 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons and military detention centers since October 7, 2023, in many cases seemingly as a direct result of torture, medical neglect, and food deprivation by soldiers and prison officers. Of those detained from Gaza, who make up the majority, less than one-third were classified by the Israeli army itself as militants — meaning Israel was responsible for the deaths of dozens of Palestinian civilians in custody.

Previously unreported data on Palestinian deaths in detention was obtained from the Israeli army and Israel Prison Service (IPS) by Physicians for Human Rights–Israel (PHRI), which released a report today publicizing these figures. According to PHRI, 98 is likely a significant undercount with human rights groups unable to locate hundreds more people reportedly detained in Gaza.  

+972 Magazine, Local Call, and The Guardian cross-referenced PHRI’s data with an internal Israeli military intelligence database, leaked to the publications earlier this year, to determine how many of the deceased detainees from Gaza the army considered to belong to the military wings of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. (The database does not contain information about members of other armed groups in Gaza, who are listed in IPS reports as accounting for less than 2 percent of all detainees from the enclave since October 7.)

Data obtained by PHRI reveals that at least 68 captives from Gaza died in Israeli custody up until the end of August. The intelligence database — whose data we obtained in May and which, according to multiple Israeli intelligence sources, the army views as the most comprehensive bank of information about Palestinian militants in Gaza — listed 21 militants as having died in Israeli custody since the war started. At the time, 65 captives from Gaza were known to have died in Israeli prisons and detention centers, suggesting that as many as 44 deceased Gazan detainees were civilians.

+972, Local Call, and The Guardian previously revealed that the army’s internal database implies that civilians accounted for 83 percent of all those killed in Gaza, as well as three-quarters of those arrested and held in detention.

In addition to the 68 Gazans, PHRI reports that 23 Palestinians from the West Bank and three with Israeli citizenship or residency died in Israeli custody during the war, prior to August of this year, amounting to 94 detainees. Since then, at least four more Palestinians have died in custody — three from the West Bank and one from Gaza — taking the total known death toll to 98. (This does not include seven additional cases in which Palestinians were shot by the army and died in custody shortly after being detained, before they reached prison facilities.)

This figure is substantially higher than previously thought. The most recent data published in early November by three Palestinian prisoners’ rights organizations (Addameer, the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, and the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society) put the number of detainees who had died in Israeli prisons and detention centers over the past two years at 81. 

Between 1967 and October 2023, according to Amani Sarahneh of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society, the total number of Palestinians who died in Israeli custody was 237. Though documentation during the initial years of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was inconsistent, the death toll among Palestinian prisoners and detainees over the past two years represents a stark escalation, reflecting how physical violence, torture, and other abuse of Palestinians has become normalized across Israel’s jail system during the war. 

Nonetheless, PHRI notes that 98 is likely a significant undercount. “This is not a full picture,” Naji Abbas, director of the organization’s Prisoners and Detainees Department, explained. “We are sure that there are still people who died in detention that we don’t know about.”

The Israeli army last provided data about detainees who died in military detention facilities in May 2024, alongside equivalent data released by the IPS regarding prisons, at which point the total death toll across both kinds of facilities was 60; this means the rate of Palestinian detainees dying in Israeli custody during the first eight months of the war was roughly one every four days. Four months later, the IPS stated in response to a freedom of information request that three more detainees had died in Israeli prisons.

Since September 2024, additional information about Palestinian deaths in Israeli custody has been received only in response to specific inquiries about individual detainees: that is, the army and the IPS confirmed particular deaths when asked, but did not provide data of their own volition.

Meanwhile, the fate of many more Palestinians who were reportedly detained by Israeli soldiers in Gaza is unknown. The army informed the Israeli human rights group HaMoked that it has no information regarding hundreds of Palestinians whom the organization suspects were detained by its forces. In the past, the army has told human rights groups that certain individuals were not in Israeli custody, only to later report in response to legal proceedings that they had died.

Families in Gaza do not receive official notification that their relatives have died in Israeli detention and often learn about it through the media. Data provided by the state to PHRI indicates that the identities of at least 18 Gazans who died in Israeli prisons are unknown, and no notice of their deaths was given to their families.

Despite almost 100 recorded deaths in custody and abundant testimonies and other evidence of severe physical abuse — including widespread sexual violence, as documented in a damning new report by the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights — only one Israeli soldier has been prosecuted; he was sentenced in February to seven months for assaulting detainees from Gaza. Five other soldiers have been charged with aggravated abuse and causing serious bodily harm to a detainee at the Sde Teiman detention center, after footage was leaked to the Israeli media last year.

As Haaretz reports, the Israeli army’s top legal official deliberately avoided launching investigations into alleged war crimes by Israeli soldiers, including in relation to deaths of detainees in custody, due to anticipated right-wing backlash.

“There have been no charges over any case of killing,” Abbas explained. “This isn’t just an individual case here and there. It is systemic and it will continue.”

According to the data obtained by PHRI, Sde Teiman was the most lethal detention facility, accounting for the deaths of 29 Palestinians since October 7. At least two more detainees died at Ofer Camp (where +972 revealed testimonies of severe abuse, electric shocks, and the rampant spread of disease), at least one at Anatot Camp, and at least seven more at various other military-operated detention facilities in southern Israel. Five died at Soroka Hospital after being transferred from military detention facilities while still in custody.

With regard to formal prisons operated by the IPS, at least 16 detainees died at Ketziot Prison, at least five at Ofer Prison, at least six inside Nitzan Prison and the IPS Medical Center (Marash), seven in Megiddo Prison, four at the complex comprising Nafha Prison and Ramon Prison, at least one at Eshel Prison, at least three inside Kishon Prison, and three more at Shikma Prison. The place of death of eight others is unknown.

‘Every night, we could hear people beaten to death’

+972, Local Call, and The Guardian reviewed 10 post-mortem reports of Palestinians who died in Israeli custody, written by doctors who attended autopsies on behalf of the families of the deceased. In five of them, there was evidence of violence as a possible cause of death: multiple broken ribs, bruising on the skin or near internal organs, and tears in internal organs. At least three deaths resulted directly from neglect — including a case of extreme malnutrition, a case of untreated blood cancer, and a case in which a diabetic detainee was deprived of insulin.

Omar Daraghmeh, 58, died in Megiddo Prison in October 2023. A post-mortem CT scan revealed extensive bleeding in his abdominal area, raising suspicion that his death was the result of physical assault or falling from a significant height.

The autopsy of Abdel Rahman Mara’i, 33, who died in the same prison the following month, also revealed signs of violence: his ribs and sternum were broken, in addition to bruising across his body. The doctor who attended Mara’i’s autopsy attributed his death to the violence he suffered.